CLIENT CASE STUDY

Driving the City of Amsterdam towards a low carbon future

Developing a robust, standardized, open methodology for energy insights and collaboration

OVERVIEW

Amsterdam is the capital city of the Netherlands. It has set itself ambitious targets for reducing CO2 emissions—a 40 percent reduction in 2025 compared to 1990—and is well known for its innovative and collaborative approach to addressing this challenge.

It sought to develop a methodology to gain insights into how to reduce its carbon footprint and identify opportunities for renewable energy as well as to engage with various stakeholders such as grid operators, water and waste management
organizations, housing corporations and knowledge institutes.

Accenture Strategy was invited to join the TRANSFORM program—a consortium of six European cities, led by Amsterdam—to develop an energy planning decision support environment (DSE). Cooperating with the Austrian Institute of Technology, who brought in their highly-specialized geographic information system, Accenture Strategy provided both strategic and program management support and its prescriptive simulation and optimization capability.

The TRANSFORM DSE enables city stakeholders and decision makers to visualize and analyze open energy data, create different transformation plans, and under a variety of future scenarios evaluate their impact on key performance indicators. The program is already resulting in a fundamental shift in the way leading cities tackle their energy and sustainability challenges.

OPPORTUNITY

The city of Amsterdam sought to develop a robust, standardized, open methodology to gain insights into how to reduce its carbon footprint and identify opportunities for renewable energy in line with Europe’s CO2 emission reduction goals and the its own targets. A decision support platform that visualizes energy consumption and renewable energy potential, and also has the ability to model the effects of energy reduction measures would be very valuable to cities and their stakeholders in identifying their opportunities and potentials.

The city of Amsterdam invited Accenture Strategy to join the TRANSFORM program—a consortium of six European cities, led by Amsterdam—to develop an energy planning decision support environment (DSE). Cooperating with the Austrian Institute of Technology, who brought in their highly-specialized geographic information system, Accenture Strategy provided both strategic and program management support and its prescriptive simulation and optimization capability.

OUTCOMES

Accenture Strategy engaged various stakeholders in a series of workshops in each of the six participating cities. These workshops helped identify the most promising areas for energy transition and specific challenges and opportunities for carbon emissions reduction.

Based on these insights and identified requirements, Accenture Strategy developed a Web-based, open data energy planning and simulation platform called TRANSFORM DSE. In parallel with its launch, Accenture Strategy developed an interactive module around urban energy planning to give city stakeholders insights on the need for cooperation and the value of sharing data for speeding up their city’s energy transition.

TRANSFORM DSE is an open data energy planning and simulation platform developed by Accenture Strategy.

One key benefit of the program was an increased awareness of how important and beneficial a common energy transition platform and processes would be for each of the consortium cities and Europe as a whole. The TRANSFORM DSE is a highly innovative, comprehensive, open and flexible tool that enables city stakeholders and decision makers to visualize and analyze open energy data, create different transformation plans and under a variety of future scenarios evaluate their impact on key performance indicators like CO2 emissions, energy consumption, renewables and energy costs. It calculates the investments needed and energy and costs reduction delivered.

Accenture Strategy is now teaming with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions to use the TRANSFORM DSE to harness the latest academic research to further develop the platform. The “expert community” around TRANSFORM DSE helps to ensure the continuous improvement of its usability and functionality, as well the sharing of knowledge between users and developers. The program’s innovative data-driven, open approach is already resulting in a fundamental shift in the way leading cities tackle their energy and sustainability challenges.